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In honour of the brave suffragettes who achieved emancipation for women, I’ve cast my vote in every general and local election since I was 21. This time I was so fed up with the major parties sniping at each other I was seriously considering giving it a miss.

I’ve had loads of bumf from the various party central offices but until yesterday I didn’t know who the local candidates were. I’d read that John Prescott’s son had stood as a prospective candidate but then heard he hadn’t won so I was pleased, yesterday, to get a leaflet from the winner, John Stockton, Labour candidate for Weaver Vale.

He listed a telephone number, a web site, e-mail address and amazingly he was on Twitter.

Great, I thought, someone who’s up with technology, I’ll be able to find out who he is and his ideas and plans for the local area. First I tried the website but Google couldn’t find it, then I put him on my Twitter list and sent him a message to this effect.

I received no response to my message so later in the day I went back and did another search on Google with the same result so I typed in the url and this time it worked, (btw Google still didn’t list his website this morning)

On a personal level, I found out he has been a local councillor, runs for charity and that’s about it! The rest of the information on the site was rehashed Labour policies and soundbites; nothing about who he really is what he wants to do locally for the constituency.

This morning I checked his Twitter feed and found he has tweeted three times (the first was March 28th) on the lines of ‘amazingly busy/long hard day visited etc etc met lots of nice people etc etc’ What does this tell me about what he really thinks? Can I trust him to be honest and principled? Or, as it seems to me, he’ll be toeing the party line.

Candidates have access to the internet and social networking sites which gives them the opportunity to reach people on a personal level and put over their thoughts and ideas. Writing a bland website, (or rather having one written) and signing up to Twitter without any idea of how it should be used is just paying lip service to technology and personally doesn’t encourage me to vote for them.

That having been said, I’ve received nothing from the local Tory or Lib Dem candidates so my decision to vote or not is still up in the air!